Abby Haight/The OregonianMembers of the Dundee Womans Club meet for their annual Christmas party and gift exchange. The community service club was founded in 1913 and still meets at 1 p.m. every first Thursday, September through May, in its historic club house, built in 1915. About 40 women belong to the club and its affiliate, the
Dundee Garden Club. Dues are $1 yearly.

Old social group beckons the change at its doorstep 

"We've been there several times, fading into nothingness, but, by Jove, we've come back. We've had weddings. We've had birthdays. We've had funerals."

The women who lived in Dundee in the early years of the past century worked hard, tending children, house and garden. They found social escape in a neighborhood sewing circle, which grew to become the Dundee Womans Club in 1913.

That's "Womans." No apostrophe.

"Maybe they didn't care if they were grammatically correct," club President Faith Gerstel says with a grin.

That's the way it's been since the club opened its own building in 1915, "and we never wanted to change it," says Gerstel, who moved to Dundee in 1976.

The Dundee Womans Club stands solid in the heart of town, its boxy face just feet from Oregon 99W. The building could use some modernizing and new paint. The club itself, like its clubhouse, remains solidly unpretentious. It also seeks "modernizing," in new, young members who will carry on the club's social and civic commitment.

The clubhouse, near the old post office, once was the social center of Dundee -- before the Columbus Day storm blew the walnut orchards right out of the valley in 1962, before grape vines replaced prunes and hops in the 1990s, before land values leapt and McMansions grew out of the rich farmland.

Dancers twirled over the clubhouse's wide wooden floor, which doubled as a basketball court. The men's athletic club met upstairs. The high school staged its graduations there. Charlie Parrett operated a barber shop and candy store in the front of the building, but only after he promised to not install a pool table.

The high school library moved into a front room at the club for several years when students switched to the Newberg high school. Even though the library moved out more than 50 years ago, the room still is known as "The Library."

Membership in the women's club was strong, with a peak of about 45. The club was civic-minded, raising support during the world wars and sponsoring Girl Scout and Boy Scout troops. Its float won the Berrian Festival Parade several times in Newberg. It raised money through dinners and pancake breakfasts and gave it to others -- the Children's Farm Home, Doernbecher Children's Hospital and the Albertina Kerr Nursery.

Elizabeth "Betty" Zenzen joined the club in the 1960s. At 94, she is the second-oldest club member (the oldest is 96). "It was the center of the community," she says

Then society changed. Women joined the work force. All around the country, women's clubs were seen as quaint anachronisms.

Membership in the Dundee Womans Club waned, but the club hung on.

"We've been there several times, fading into nothingness, but, by Jove, we've come back," Gerstel says. "We've had weddings. We've had birthdays. We've had funerals."

The clubhouse is on the Oregon Historical Register and a sign proclaims it a National Historic Landmark. The building is used every Sunday by a local church, and it is still a regular meeting place for Scout troops.

Club members are raising money to have the building painted and some needed repairs done.

A couple of years ago, the club agreed to sponsor the Dundee Garden Club. The garden club raises membership to about 40 and, many hope, will infuse the women's club with young members to carry on its creed.

Abby Haight/The Oregonian

Recently, club members met for their annual Christmas party. They filled just one long table, women of a certain age, dressed in bright holiday reds and greens. There were bowls of candies, plates of homemade cookies, the easy warmth of longtime friends. And a bin for the cans of food each woman brought to give to the hungry in their community.

From the "club womans collect," or prayer, written in 1904:

"Grant that we may realize that it is the little things that create differences, that in the big things in life, we are as one. And may we strive to touch and to know the great common woman's heart of us all, and, O Lord, let us forget not to be kind."